Great stinking balls of fire

Living out in the country is pretty nice. Until it isn’t. Stink bug season is one such unpleasant time.

It arrived last weekend as I was mowing under a little fruit tree. As I spun my zero turn underneath, its branches bounced off my bald head, shaking the little stinkers down my T-shirt.

Even though I know better, I flinched and slapped a few. They reacted as they always do, emitting an acrid cilantro scent.

Some 20 years ago, the brown marmorated stink bug was discovered in Allentown, Pennsylvania, an import from China and reason enough to support President Trump’s trade war with Beijing.

It moved fast to Virginia and is now in 44 states and four Canadian provinces. Its stink isn’t the only problem. It also bruises fruits and veggies. The bug does a number on our apples and tomatoes.

The peak season comes around the equinox, Sept. 23 this year, when most of the bugs move from fields and gardens to their winter home, and that, for us, means our house and barn.

One year, so many arrived that our outside garage wall was literally brown with them. From there, they try to find a tight space to hibernate in, often under the siding or in engines, shoes, clothes kept in the barn, and even wrench sockets.

The worst is when they find a way inside the house. They are not graceful fliers and they are loud. And they poop out brown stains where they land.

Inside, they love to cuddle in curtains. And for some reason, they like the Mr. Coffee pot I set to turn on automatically at 4 a.m. Nothing like a sip of stinky, chunky java in the early morning.

How they got into the house was a mystery. We caulked the outside openings and closed all the windows, but for the first few years of the now yearly invasion, they still made it in.

Then last year, I saw a few flying out of the fireplace. Hmm. Were they crawling down the chimney? I got a flashlight and looked up. Thousands looked down. Yikes.

It seemed like the natural thing would be to fill the fireplace with newspaper and light it to force them out the top. The match was struck and the paper lit, starting the blaze.

And, of course, the stink bugs did not go up, but down, flying through the flames slow enough to catch fire and land throughout the family room. Yes, stinky, blazing bombs flying through the house. Not the smartest move.

Plan B, however, worked, and I perfected it this year. Since the chimney is too high to cut off access, we close up the fireplace. This year, I’m using foam board insulation from Home Depot and America’s best tool, duct tape. I cut an entry door through which I drop in a bug bomb every week to kill ’em until their season ends when the first freeze hits.

While I’ve already seen dozens of stink bugs making their trek to our house and barn, one of the nation’s experts told me that the worst may be over in some parts of the country, including the East Coast.

Tracy C. Leskey, who leads the study project for the bug for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, told me that she and her partners in over a dozen colleges and universities are seeing lower numbers thanks to some natural killers, such as a comma-sized “samurai wasp,” also from China.

“It’s nothing like it used to be,” said Leskey, who I call every September to see how close we are to winning the war on the stink bug.

This year, she brought especially good news of a new trick used in orchards to use their own smell to kill them. Commercial vendors have made a lure embedded with the scent stink bugs use to attract each other. They put it next to bed netting impregnated with pesticide that the bugs land on.

Now she’s smelling success. “We’re going to let them just kill themselves,” she said.

Paul Bedard is a senior columnist and author of Washington Secrets.